Coveo vs Glean: pricing, features and which to choose

Coveo is a Canadian software company listed on the Toronto Stock Exchange under the ticker CVO and led by co-founder and CEO Laurent Simoneau. It sells what it calls an AI-Relevance Platform to large enterprises in four areas: commerce search and product discovery, customer service portals and agent tools, websites, and workplace search for employees. Coveo says more than 700 brands use the platform, and its customer announcements include Palo Alto Networks, Intuit, Deloitte, Boston Scientific and the Australian Taxation Office. Commerce was its fastest growing use case in fiscal 2026, at nearly 60% of new business bookings, with strength among B2B manufacturers and distributors.

The core of Coveo is a unified index that pulls content from more than 30 connectors, including Salesforce, ServiceNow, SharePoint, Confluence, SAP Commerce, Shopify and websites, while respecting each source's permissions. Machine learning models rank results by behavior, recommend products and articles, suggest queries and personalize results for each visitor. Merchandisers and administrators get tools to boost, bury or pin results, run A/B tests and read analytics on searches with no results. Coveo offers prebuilt integrations for Salesforce, including Coveo for Agentforce, plus SAP, Adobe and ServiceNow, and headless libraries for teams that build their own front end. Coveo says customers typically go live in four to six weeks.

Coveo's strengths are deep relevance tuning across many content sources, permission-aware indexing, strong commerce merchandising tools, Salesforce and SAP integrations, and generative answers and an MCP server built on the same index. Its weaknesses are quote-only pricing aimed at large budgets, a setup that usually needs partners or internal search specialists, and more platform than a small site needs. Algolia is a developer-friendly hosted search rival. Elastic offers open search infrastructure to build on. Glean focuses on employee workplace search. Google Vertex AI Search covers search and RAG on Google Cloud. Choose Coveo if you run large commerce or support sites and want AI search tuned for revenue.

Glean is an enterprise AI company founded in 2019. Its product connects workplace information to search and assistant workflows. Unlike a standalone consumer chatbot, its value depends on integration with the organization's documents, applications, identities, and access permissions.

Deployment begins with connecting business systems and configuring identity and permissions. Employees can then search across connected information or ask questions grounded in organizational content. Agent workflows build on that foundation, making connector coverage and permission configuration part of the buying decision.

Glean competes with Guru for organizational knowledge access, Microsoft 365 Copilot for suite-centered assistance, and Atlassian Rovo for connected workplace search. Its trade-off is enterprise deployment and negotiated pricing rather than a self-serve trial price. Pick Glean when cross-application knowledge access and permissions justify an organization-wide implementation.